The use of multiple transmit antennas in digital, wireless communication systems has been shown to be useful for increasing data rate and for improving performance for receivers with either single or multiple receive antennas. In these systems, the transmitted signals are transmitted with substantially the same carrier frequency and bandwidth so that their channel responses overlap in the frequency domain. Many known approaches are open-loop systems, i.e. there is no feedback between the receiver to the transmitter regarding knowledge about the channel response. When this channel knowledge is present, then multiple transmit antennas can be used to improve data rates using closed-loop techniques.
The advantage in the above techniques is obtained since the channels are not the same from different transmit (Tx) antennas to the receive (Rx) antenna(s). The various approaches rely upon being able discriminate the different transmitted signals from one another. When coherent reception of the transmitted signals is used, the channel response for each transmitted signal is obtained at the receiver via an estimation process. This estimation process is complex, processor intense and less accurate when channels from different transmitted signals interfere with one another. Additionally, multipath makes the estimation process more difficult since the signals overlap in time (delay) with one another.
Semi-blind techniques have been used to estimate the channel response in order to perform joint demodulation for one desired signal and one interferer. However, in those cases that channel responses for the two users are similar, the performance of the joint demodulation receiver degrades compared to the case when channel estimates can be easily distinguished. One technique for improving performance in fading channels is to adaptively update (track) the channel estimates. However, this leads to the problem of channel switching, where estimated channels are incorrectly assigned to user signals. Even after the fading waveforms be distinguishable, channel estimates may be incorrectly assigned to users. This channel switching results in detection errors for long bursts, until the channel estimates are reassigned to their correct users, for example, by another channel switch.